


The Maiden and the Hag

by nightfall rising (potionpen), potionpen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, alternate version, part of larger fic, subjectiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 18:27:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7585276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/nightfall%20rising, https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/potionpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <span class="small">or: Valley of the Shadow: Act II, Chapter 21, scene iv, draft A</span>
</p><p> </p><p>Beta: ZOMG, what an (CENSORED!)<br/>Author: ...Oookay,  clearly you are not reading the chapter I meant to write.<br/>(Much, much revision)<br/>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>Beta: ...My understanding of this chapter has just gone through a sudden sea-change: like a chemical reaction spreading out from boiling point.  HOLY (CENSORED).<br/>Author: Phew, chapter is correct now!<br/>Beta: I want all of your readers to be able to read both versions, because this is CRAZY.  This is tragedy in stereo, because <i>I can't stop seeing both heartbreaking sides at once</i>.<br/>Author: As you wish.</p><p><b>Please note!</b> Yes, this is a draft of a piece of a chapter of a longer work.  If you aren't up to date on that fic, this will make no (CENSORED) sense. vOv</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Maiden and the Hag

**Author's Note:**

> If you correctly explain the title to me, I'll contact you privately to invite you to play the question game and post the answers in the end-notes of Valley's next chapter. Terms and conditions apply, but don't they always? 
> 
> One of them is: I'll confirm or deny no answers in public, so you'll have to _provide_ a way to contact you privately. Using your AO3 account will do.
> 
> Here is the finished version of [the chapter this ended up as.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4385660/chapters/17259304)  
> 

He apparated back to the hotel soon after that, without any strain at all, so they couldn’t have been too far away. It was just as well, too, because his mind was almost too full of silver to focus properly. Quicksilver, maybe…

Severus was looking worried, and had overprepared, naturally. The fire was roaring and the sofa blanket had gone all greyish, which probably meant Severus had done something nice to the texture. There was a plate of stuff and some sticks on the side table, maybe toasting forks.

“Are you all right?”

The door to the bathroom was open, and there was all scented steam coming out, and Evan caught a glimpse of a tray of potions and some bandages or something of that sort. And then he could see that there were candles in the bedroom, which meant probably there were other nice things in there, too.

“What did he want?”

He gave Severus a smile, which could possibly have been on the distracted side, and settled down to work, sending the plate of bread-and-things off to the mantle with a flick of his wand and enlarging the side-table to a good writing-desk height.

“Evan?”

Of course, he could only do first drafts of sketches without having even pictures of faces in front of him, although his memory for faces was quite well trained. He should be able to at least make a start when it came to the people he knew well. Lucius and Reggie and Bella especially. Severus would take more thought, especially since he was under special and very sarcastic instruction not to burden Severus with anything heartrendingly beautiful that would, due to being striking, get him noticed and killed even if he’d agree to wear it.

“Evan?”

At least, he should be able to make a start with contour, if not with design, but did he _need_ to start with contour? Yes, he probably did; you didn’t want to force a design around pre-existing curves or angles you hadn’t properly accounted for, you wanted to weave designs around those shapes.

“Evan, can you even hear me?”

But he could _conceptualize_ , at least. Take Lucius: platinum on black. All that floaty hair, those albino peacocks: a study in striking, whether it was advisable or not. Liked his hunting, oh, didn’t he just. Evan didn’t know whether he or Rodolphus had actually gone so far as to go Wild Hunting with muggles yet, but he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. A touch of Herne?

_“Ev?”_

Rodolphus would just be solid, solid, solid. Placid, pleased, calm, not half so dramatic—

A flash of green was Evan’s whole world. When it cleared, his parchment was black ash.

He turned to Severus, slowly. His hands, he could barely feel through a curtain of numbness, were starting to shake. Severus’s face was dead white, his jaw dead set and his eyes blazing black ice, the way they went when he’d decided he didn’t care if he threw his whole life out the window.

In a voice so steady it surprised him, Evan inquired, “Did you just avada my sketches?”

Severus looked, if possible, even more furious. “Try not to be more insane than you can help,” he snarled, his throat so tight every word looked and sounded wrenched from it.

Evan’s own throat was spasming a bit, too, but he just about managed to get out, “ _Priori incantato._ ”

The ghost of a crackling green lightning bolt slipped away from Severus’s fingers. Hung in the air. Faded. His wand was sheathed at his side.

Evan looked at it. “That’s the spell you hit Lockhart with when he tried to kiss you.”

“I wouldn’t call it a spell,” Severus grated. “ _What did he do to you._ ”

“He didn’t _do_ anything to me,” Evan said evenly. “He gave me a job.”

“Lightning is electricity,” Severus said flatly, eyes burning. “Electricity disrupts magic. You didn’t hear me. You barely saw me. You didn’t hear _me._ ”

“It was an _interesting assignment_ ,” Evan told him, possibly just a bit more emphatically than evenly. “If you thought I was under a compulsion, you could have used a finite. You didn’t have to destroy my sketches!”

“They were disturbing.”

He very deliberately placed his palms on the sofa on either side of himself, and took in a long breath. “They were supposed to be disturbing. Being disturbing was the entire point!”

Severus’s face didn’t change—certainly not to regret what he’d done. The only change was that his eyes actually managed to go even more incandescent with rage. “For this,” he whispered, nearly strangled, his hands tightening into talons. “If for no other reason, for this.”

Evan just looked at him, his supply of patience and understanding at an all-time low.

“My craft,” Severus said, very low, shaking, “is easily perverted. So easily corrupted. _So_ easily. So easily even muggles have known it for centuries. So easily even muggles can _do_ it. I knew he’d try. I knew he _would_. They would. I knew they’d make me. But yours. That anyone should force _filth_ into yours. Should turn the work of _your hands_.”

Quite a lot of Evan’s anger wearily drained away. “Oh, Severus,” he sighed, raising his hand to his temples, rubbing away the last swirls and eddies of it and the painful headachy dregs, leaning back into the sofa. “You’re such a _samurai_.”

Severus shrugged, his own spines and snarls collapsing like dry sand in the ebb and wake of Evan’s tight civility. “Only death will cure a fool,” he quipped with an attempt at riffing insouciantly off the accusation. It might have worked better if the anger hadn’t, in his case, left the shakes to fend for themselves, along with fear and a sort of woundedness that wasn’t anything like hurt feelings.

Evan thought he’d better not answer that remark, given that it wasn’t just Severus’s hands that were trembling but, ever-so-faintly, his mouth. Evan had not hurt his feelings. Evan did not, himself, feel cut at all, but here was Severus in front of him, bleeding.

Keeping silent seemed to have been a wise decision, although the results were rather more upsetting than being yelled at or even having his sketches cursed. Severus took a hesitant step towards him, and then another, and then dropped to bury his face in Evan’s lap.

“Stoppit, Spike,” Evan said softly, laying a gentle hand on the back of his neck.

The _no_ that made it up to him was muffled.

“I’m still mad at you,” Evan informed him. “You made me think you aimed a killing curse in my direction. Within a foot of my _face_. You did it on purpose, Naj.”

Severus looked up at him. He was still very white. “You were gone,” he said, his jaw set again. “You hadn’t come back. “You were gone and you were _cold_. It was worse than summers at school. You’d been gone less than an hour and you came back gone from me. What am I _for_?”

“You’re not _for_ what you can do for me,” Evan told him, annoyed and exasperated, and then told his instant offended glare, “no matter what Mum says.”

“ _I_ say,” Spike further glowered at him, mulishly. “ _My_ hearth. _Mine_.”

Evan tried—really, _very hard_ —not to melt. Horrible behavior should not be encouraged. Knowing he was fighting a losing battle, he suggested, “You could have just slapped me, you know.”

“Wouldn’t have worked,” Severus declared, sitting back and looking at him with a challenging tilt to his head. Because Spike absolutely _was_ a smug git. He wasn’t git enough to smile, though. He didn’t even seem to want to. He was just sure he was right.

Evan sighed again, but just to himself this time. “Because you thought whatever compulsion you thought he had on me was stronger than that?”

Spike scoffed, standing, and offered him a hand by which to be pulled up. “Because you’re Slytherin, Lance. Why would anything throw you twice?”

Halfway up, Evan let himself turn into dead weight, eyes narrowing. “And exactly where do you think flattery is going to take you, Severus Prince-Snape?” he demanded.

Severus curled in, hauling him further up, nearly nose to nose. “I’ll go where I choose, Schwarzrosiger, thank you.”

“And where would that be?” he asked, since it seemed to be expected.

Daring him, Spike let his free hand open with the flying-dove flair of a performer’s promise. The other hand, in his, was all strength and skin dutifully maintained like the precious tool it was, stretched over the prickly, anxious, fervent, ferocious magic that Evan wanted to carry cradled inside his bones. “Shall I surprise you?”

(Even when Spike was being a complete set of horse’s hindquarters, Ev acknowledged to himself ruefully. Or at least, probably far more quickly afterwards than would make other people sanguine about Evan’s mental health. But it was Spike who’d used the word ‘codependent’ first, all the way back in fifth year, so that was probably all right. Besides, it wasn’t as if either of them even knew anyone who was so much as on speaking terms with mental health, Narcissa probably excepted. So there you were.)

“I think you owe me a _lovely_ surprise,” Evan decided, letting Severus pull him up and in. He added reproachfully, “A foot from my _face_ , Spike.”

“Damn the torpedoes,” the cobra said flatly, cupping his face as if holding it together. “ _Whatever works._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> Again, this is the version that fails to convey what's going on (and is otherwise quite first-drafty). We now return you to [your semi-regularly scheduled fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4385660/chapters/17259304).


End file.
